Localytics Raises $16M To Help Complete The Picture For Mobile Marketers

0

Mobile analytics and marketing firm Localytics has raised $16 million in a Series C round led by Foundation Capital and including existing investor Polaris Partners. The new funding is going to help the firm grow its international presence, and will also be used to help it build out its team of experts and library of content for helping its customers make sense of their engagement and usage data.

“Last year was a phenomenal year for us, and alongside growth of mobile and the maturity of mobile, we’re able to ride that wave and broaden our platform from analytic to include a tightly integrated marketing platform,” explained Localytics CEO Raj Aggarwal in an interview. “We just saw a lot of growth, and just getting a lot of stuff right in terms of repeatability of business and unit economics.”

While the company wasn’t looking to raise money, according to Aggarwal, since they still had plenty of cash in the bank from the previous $9 million they’d raised in revenue, there was a lot of inbound interest from big investors. Timing, given mobile’s current trajectory, combined with a desire to grow the business rapidly, finally led the firm to take on a fresh injection of capital.

Foundation was the right partner for this because of their “depth of understanding about marketing software,” in part, Aggarwal said. He also added that their reputation for being a group of people who are really helpful held true during their discussions with Foundation itself, and with its existing portfolio companies. Aggarwal termed this round “extremely competitive,” and yet Foundation was the sole firm to make the cut in terms of new investors.

Boston-based Localytics will be focusing on continuing its European expansion using the funds, from its new office in London, but there will also be a focus on finding experts to join the team and help build out its self-service marketing content.

“What we’re doing is we’re taking all these best practices and other knowledge from all these verticals, and we’re codifying that and turning them into best practice guides, video seminars, creating bootcamps, etc.,” Aggarwal said. “Obviously, we’re using our tools as a backdrop for how they could do that, but the main point is to educate the industry, because while analytics in mobile is starting to mature a bit, analytics in mobile is still completely new and people don’t know what to do.”

The company powers analytics for over 20,000 apps currently from over 5,000 companies, reaching 1.4 billion user devices, according to its own stats. Mobile marketing and analytics is a hot space given the trends in consumer device usage, but it’s also a competitive one, so this new round should help Localytics keep up with the fast pace of the market.

0

Crunchbase

OverviewLocalytics is the leading mobile engagement platform. We give companies the insights and tools they need to improve their mobile app acquisition, engagement and retention efforts. Our secret sauce is in the data. We use all the data surrounding users to deliver highly targeted and personalized engagement campaigns, including push and in-app messages. We then use performance data to measure and optimize …